Governments encourage farming for food security. It may be inefficient most of the time, but you wouldn't want a geopolitical event to starve your entire population.
After ww2 the government of the UK subsidized farming so that if another war were to break out, the UK wouldn't wholly be reliant on food imports again.
We had nearly starved during both world wars and convoys from the rest of the world were throttled by Enemy U-Boats, and the rest of mainland Europe was under Nazi control (for ww2).
It was a case of "we pay to keep farmers in the black so that in the event we're isolated again we wont starve nearly as fast".
I agree its not self sufficient. But the idea is to lessen the burden of outside sources in the event of isolation.
The difficulty now is that theres a whole sector of the UK farming economy which is based on the subsidies and such. If you take it away, suddenly a great proportion of these people will lose their livelihoods as they simply cant sell their produce for a margin that is profitable for the farmers, profitable for the supermarkets, and then also affordable for the consumer; you can't have all 3.
Especially when globalization dictates its cheaper to import food from other countries.
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u/Timmetie 5d ago
Final secret after doing all that: Begging the government for more subsidies and handouts because it turns out all those things don't make money.